1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to document processing by service providers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Business process providers provide data processing of documents for their clients. They are increasingly trying to serve customers from a consolidated process platform. Traditionally, if they were processing invoices for five different customers, they would maintain five different teams trained in each customer's unique invoice process and each of these teams would work on invoice entry systems which are specific to that customer. This can be inefficient because each team typically is trained differently, each software system typically is maintained separately, and each team typically maintains separate pools of excess labor to deal with high volume situations (peak capacity).
As a result, business process providers may attempt to realize efficiencies by serving multiple customers using the same team and the same software. An associated trend is the development of business process as a service (BPaaS). Here too, BPaaS providers may attempt to realize efficiencies by providing a single process platform to multiple clients with similar but not identical client processes and data formats.
One inhibitor to this approach is that different customers typically have slightly different flavors of the same process. Thus, customer A's invoicing format may differ from Customer B's invoicing format in minor ways, but in ways that prevent the same process from being used for both customers. To address this, the business process provider might create a standardized format (e.g., a standard invoicing format) to be used with all clients and then map each of the fields in the different client formats to corresponding fields in the provider's standardized format.
However, this mapping is typically created manually by expensive skilled professionals. Moreover, if any client process or client format changes, for whatever reason, the mapping between the fields has to be manually updated by the experts. The same is true if the provider format changes, for whatever reason. The situation is compounded as the number of different client formats and the number of different provider formats grows, and this is expected to be the case as business process providers try to aggregate more clients and client processes.
The aggregation of clients and their data processing needs can also result in similar or related concerns with respect to storing the clients' data.
Thus, there is a need for improved approaches to business processing.
The figures depict embodiments of the present invention for purposes of illustration only. One skilled in the art will readily recognize from the following discussion that alternative embodiments of the structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed without departing from the principles of the invention described herein.